Mobile translation software for international travelers. The system provides instructions, in the user's language, on how to purchase and use tickets for foreign transit systems.
Travelers love to explore, but are often hindered by the amount of time they spend trying to figure out the local transit system.
To design and develop a realistic mobile solution, that will allow our users to focus on their trip rather than their transportation.
Communication Designer — I was in charge of creating the brand identity, designing the print materials, and developing the user interface of the software.
1) Sent out "cultural probe" packages
2) Developed user personas
3) Filmed video informances
4) Brainstorming and ideation
5) Developed quick prototypes
6) Conducted participatory workshop
7) Developed final prototype
A working prototype of the Transvendor application, built in Flash, was presented after 13 weeks of ideating, processing, developing, and working with our audience.
Cultural Probe — To learn about our audience, we contacted people with little, some, or lots of travel experience and sent them each a "cultural probe," a bag of items that ask open-ended questions and encourage our users to describe themselves and their experiences. From these probes, we uncovered their wants, needs, likes, and dislikes, among other things.
The results of our findings were presented the following week with a poster (see above). From a communication design perspective, my main goal was to convey the theme of traveling to the rest of the class, which I achieved by taking tickets, photos, and writings that we got back from our users and placing them in a scrapbook-like collage.
Personas — Using the information collected from our Cultural Probes, we developed personas that represented our ideal target audience, in order to give us "tangible" people to design for. We used these personas as additional inputs in our design process (in addition to the hard Probe results).
For the design of these posters, I focused on maintaining the handmade scrapbook feel, using a "cut-and-paste" style along with handwriting and little details like Scotch tape.
Video Informances — By creating quick and dirty video informances, we were able to look at several possible situations that our users could encounter on a trip, situations that could be improved through design. The three scenarios all revolved around the issue of communication.
Participatory Workshop — We held a workshop to get some first-hand collaborative brainstorming with members of our audience. During this session, we noticed that the issue of ticket purchasing at train stations/buses came up often, and we were confident that that was the issue we should focus on. The result was the Transvendor.
Working Prototype (Screens) — Despite our penchant for the scrapbook look, we went with a cleaner approach for the Transvendor identity and interface. As communication was always the main issue with our project, we needed to make sure that our final product was as easy to understand and absorb (visually) as possible. A limited color palate, clean typeface, and plenty of white space were the main aspects of our designs.
